It happened on a particularly breezy spring day in a radiantly blooming garden that
there lived an insect. Not an insignificant insect, mind you, which I can tell by the
way you're reading this is exactly the sort you were initially picturing. In fact
insects are far more significant than most of us give them credit for. The dobsonfly,
for instance. One look and you're bound to say, "Now there is a significant insect."
Right before running away from it. Unfortunate, you know, because that particular
dobsonfly really wanted to be friends with you.
Oh, well, it thought. Back to the dobsonfly equivalent of internet dating sites.
The dobsonfly equivalent of internet dating sites, we should mention, consists mainly
of flying about until one smells a dobsonfly of the opposite sex, then following the
smell to the source and trying to manipulate it into a copulatory position with
oneself. Not unlike our human dating sites, really. We can only assume that this is
rousingly unsuccessful most of the time, as we've only ever seen one dobsonfly in
person, and it seemed preoccupied with the state of its own dwindling population.
But enough about dobsonfly significance. Let us turn toward the subject of our own
insignificance. In the maddening scope of the universe, you are no more significant
than one of the billions of atoms that comprise a single strand from a fly's leg
hair.
"Take THAT!" drones the buzz of an insect chorus. And I agree. Never let size be the
determinate factor in your estimation of a being's worth. Single-celled microbes have
lain waste to entire populations.
So it happened that there was a very significant insect, significant because it
carried a microbe that would ultimately lay waste to an entire population. But also
significant because of what it would become. A butterfly? No. Good guess though. A
butterfly isn't one thing becoming another. It's just the first thing reaching its
full potential. It's the caterpillar's best self. No, our insect was about to become
something entirely different because its very DNA was about to change. Its DNA and
the DNA of the hitherto harmless disease it carried.
The catalyst for this change was a wormhole. Not the theoretical space travel sort,
but the very common sort found in your own garden, tunneled by real worms. But what
sort of insect could fly into a tiny hole tunneled by real worms? A gnat?
Why not? A gnat. It was no trouble, as the hole itself was abnormally large because
the worms who tunneled it had themselves been privy to slight alterations in the bits
of their DNA that dictated size. And so, eager to show off their newly altered bits
of DNA to the neighbors, they abandoned the wormhole and went squiggling off to be
swallowed up immediately by robins and sparrows, then somewhat digested before being
vomited back into the mouths of those robins' and sparrows' sons and daughters.
In all the confusion, neither the robins, the sparrows nor the worms saw the gnat
steal into the wormhole, but steal he did. Yes, he. Indeed the gnat of our story was
male. Not that it should matter to you, who likely have such little experience in
gnat genitalia that the knowledge of its sex will have no bearing on our tale
whatever.
Oh, but it does! For the only reason our little gnat corrected course and dove for
the worm tunnel is that he spotted what he thought was the intergnational symbol for
'male' on the ground by the hole, and it happened that the he fancied a wee. But this
was not the intergnational symbol for 'male', at least not deliberately. One of the
scrappier worms had put up a particularly commendable fight before being swallowed by
its predator, and the stray bits of worm gut that lay on the ground by the hole
commemorating its struggle coincidentally happened to resemble the intergnational
symbol for 'male'. And so the gnat entered and began looking about for the
entomological equivalent of a urinal. But there was no urinal.
What he did find was a wormhole, and this time it was the theoretical space travel
sort. He traversed it, mistaking it for the doorway to a lavatory stall that might
offer him some measure of privacy. Instead of privacy he found an alien world peopled
by a race of super-intelligent geometry, intergalactic origami that infused him with
a working aptitude for their particular language, which happened to be entirely
olfactory in nature. A high council was convened, and on a platform under a spotlight
the gnat gazed in awe up at all the angled shapes that glowed at him in a hovering
semicircle from the surrounding darkness.
Vice Chancellor Rhombus emitted an odor that conveyed thusly: "Master Lawrence
Gnathanson, as this insect has emitted a smell indicating his preference to be
called, comes to us from a world of famine and pestilence, of suffering and of war.
Of regurgitating one's prey into the mouths of one's sons and daughters. Let us
increase the size of Master Lawrence's mind and populate it with all the solutions to
the problems which yet plague his... Hang on, do I smell on him that hitherto
harmless disease that we've all been warned about not having developed an immunity
to? OH SHIT OH SHIT OHSHITOHSHIT..."
And instantly the entire population, every last trapezoid of them, fell dead, leaving
only Master Lawrence Gnathanson, on whose shoulders the task of repopulating their
world now fell. So he began to lay gnat eggs all over the angled corpses of his
decaying hosts. Curious, isn't it? All this time you thought he was a male. Well, I
warned you about your ignorance regarding gnat genitalia. He must've been ignorant
himself, for it was his own eagerness to use the men's lavatory that brought him to
this world in the first place. Though perhaps he was a male, and it was merely a
slight alteration in his DNA that ultimately enabled him to lay eggs.
Well, no matter. His eggs were everywhere now, and soon they would hatch. Hatch and
breed and feed and breed, mutating, growing, thriving, spreading, changing, over eon
upon eon, until eventually, over billions of years, his descendants evolved into that
marvel of the natural world, the curious form of life now commonly known as Sir David
Attenborough.
The moral? Don't be so hubristic about your DNA alterations that you can't wait to
show the neighbors. If there's one thing your neighbors hate, it's having to wee and
rushing into what they thought was a men's lavatory only to find no urinals at all,
misled by your coincidentally-shaped-like-the-international-symbol-for-male guts
above the door.
Oh, well. I suppose now they'll just have to piss all over themselves.
